I have been a pc boy since they first came out around 1980's, gone over to the darkside this year (Mac's) and don't regret it at all. The speed of my iMac 27" is the same as when I first brought it about a year ago...no crashes, every runs well and quickly...stable as...

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Nearly here! It left Shanghai on Tuesday/Wednesday, flew to Incheon in Korea, then popped into Almaty in Kazakhstan, took a detour to Warsaw in Poland and then on to Cologne in Germany. There it spent just over 24 hours sight-seeing (hope it avoided the beer halls) and then hopped onto a plane to East Midlands airport in the UK, about an hour north of here. An hour and a quarter later it was on the road and whizzed past me on the M5 motorway to get a quick look at the old docks at Gloucester at sunrise. No time to gather dust there, though, as within 21 minutes it was out for delivery. I wonder where it is now...

Update: Woohooo! It arrived just after lunch. All I've had time to do so far is unbox it, connect up the charger, switch it on and perform the initial setup. Only one gotcha in that the very user friendly routine found both my wireless networks (I allow the ID to be broadcast) and correctly prompted me for a password to access the network. Entering the password failed, as I knew it would, because my wireless network is set to only talk to MAC addresses (Airport IDs) it has already been told about. The setup routine wasn't telling me what the Airport ID was so my only option was to tell the Air not to connect to a network. Once initial setup was complete I was easily (kudos Apple) able to find the information I wanted and setup the wireless connection again having first told my network the Air's MAC address.

That's it for now. The machine is currently doing a software update and then I'll spend the weekend progressing from my current state as a total newbie to OS X and fettling some software onto my new MacBook Air.

Oh, I think I forgot to say that the MacBook Air 13" (2010) is drop-dead gorgeous! The photos hardly do it justice.

Having used Safari to download a Firefox browser "dmg" file I had no idea what to do with it so I made the classic mistake and ran Firefox from there instead of dragging the icon to my Applications folder. This is not intuitive stuff and the Mac's help system wasn't that helpful. Google to the rescue.

With Firefox correctly installed the next job was to try and find out where it had squirrelled away the user profile. Finally found it under Library/Application Support/Firefox which allowed me to copy my Windows Firefox profile across to the Mac. Restarted Firefox and I now have access to not only all my stored Bookmarks and Toolbar items but also all my saved passwords. For some reason I had to uninstall and then reinstall the British dictionary but my other Add-ons appear to be working just fine without such re-installation.

I'm sure Safari is a fine browser but I'm much more interested in maintaining a common environment and data compatibility across both operating systems. For that reason OpenOffice will be installed on the Mac for the same reason.

Hey Bob, slightly off-topic, but MAC address filtering will only keep your neighbours out, it's very easy to spoof them (and you know which ones you need, because they are sent out in the clear, regardless of encryption).

That's all

_________________I take pictures so quickly, my highschool was "Continuous High".

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Thanks for that. It's just an extra layer I have enabled and isn't my primary defence. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right place but I think the OS X setup routine should have offered me the Airport ID rather than forcing me to quit wireless setup. Actually, I'll retract that - it should have offered me the MAC address which is what the rest of the world, as I understand it, uses. Maybe Apple thinks it's customers can't understand the difference between Mac and MAC.

Hey Bob, if an app within the dmg comes as a .app file, it is a standalone file and can be run from anywhere in the system, if it's a .mpkg it usually needs to be installed but there is the rare app that will install from a .app file.

If you've been using MS Office in Windows, you also have the new Office 11 as an alternative, it is supposed to be quite good. I find OpenOffice to be quite different and slightly more annoying to use than in Windows.

Instead of Safari Bob, you could use Chrome, I use this one all my PC's/Macs and it syncs up your bookmarks etc So doesn't matter which PC/Mac you are on, your bookmarks are always the same and up to date.

Yes Office 2011 for Mac is now out and I have ordered a copy, so you can import your PST from PC to Mac, which is a dream as before it was a real pain in the a**

Yeah just drag install files into application folder..and then install..

Yeah, the mac address is pretty much the underlying layer for local area networks. But then again, mac filtering is pretty rare nowadays, and it's not that simple to setup (go to router, login, permit mac adres).

_________________I take pictures so quickly, my highschool was "Continuous High".

Things are progressing well here despite the odd glitch. Part of the problem is that, as a Windows "power user", I get a little frustrated when I can't get OS X to do exactly what I want yesterday!

I installed the Apple supplied app for Windows to allow my MacBook Air to use a DVD drive on the Windows machine. Not the smartest app in the world as it only offers use of the first DVD drive it finds and that was a problem for me which was quickly sorted this morning by getting around to swapping out the failed DVD drive for a replacement (the controller on that particular DVD drive failed a few days ago). Once done I was able to install the Canon supplied software that came with both my EOS 5D Mark II and my PowerShot G10. G10 files are normally downloaded by a program called CameraWindow but when I connected the G10 via a USB cable and switched it on CameraWindow popped up a message saying it had "failed to initialize" and shut down. A quick Google elicited that there's an incompatibility with OS X 10.6 - not a good start. However both ImageBrowser and iPhoto can see the G10 and download photos so I do have options.

Much better news on the EOS 5D Mark II front in that, as I've been used to under Windows 7, connecting the camera via a USB cable and switching it on brings up Canon's EOS Utility from which one can download photos and then have Canon's DPP fire up automatically for inspection and optional post-processing. Even better news was that, on an admittedly very brief test, the EOS Utility is fully capable of controlling the 5D Mark II for a spot of tethered shooting. This is one of the main reasons I bought the MacBook Air and it was a great relief to see this all working after the CameraWindow fiasco.

On a more general note, now that I've configured the Dock to auto-hide I'm much happier. The 13" Air has generous 1440 by 900 native resolution but I do find I want all of that vertical resolution available when an application window is maximised. Too used to 1280 pixels on the main PC, I suppose. The screen on the Air is excellent with even backlighting and all those pixels crammed into those 13.3 diagonal inches make it look incredible sharp. I don't plan to do much, if any, photo-editing on the Air but if I had to I don't think it'd be a problem.

In reply to a couple of comments above (for which Thank You) I use OpenOffice on the W7 PC for everything except email for which I use Outlook 2003. Hence my decision to use OpenOffice on the Mac. Email is not something I want to use the Mac for, ever!

I'm still way down the learning curve in coming to grips with OS X but I know it will do everything I want it to and, for those who like its way of presenting applications and data to a user, it is capable of far more. So far as the piece of hardware known as a "MacBook Air 13" (2010)" is concerned I can't say enough good things about it. Uber stylish, very quick to start up, light, great battery life, snappy in operation - the list goes on. Obviously there are limits in what one can cram into a machine of this size but, so far, I've nothing but praise for what Apple has accomplished.

In reply to a couple of comments above (for which Thank You) I use OpenOffice on the W7 PC for everything except email for which I use Outlook 2003. Hence my decision to use OpenOffice on the Mac.

OpenOffice.org for Mac is very un-Mac I'd say. I only use when I absolutely need to. Over the years I use Microsoft Office for Mac, then iWorks, and I now find that iWorks does 98% of tasks I do on Office.

If all fails (or other reasons), you can install Windows under Parallels Desktop for Mac or boot into Windows directly with Boot Camp. You would then have the compact and lightweight MacBook Air and the Windows you are familiar with.